How Nios works
How Nios turns purchase data into nature and climate impacts.
Nios measures the environmental impacts of the goods and services your organization buys, from raw material extraction to the supplier's gate. You bring spend or quantity data, and Nios calculates environmental pressures, biodiversity impact in PDF·yr, and climate impact in t CO₂e.
The workflow
Collect
Add your activities, the organization behind them, and your own impact inputs. See Collect data.
Match
Each activity gets a base sector. You select it yourself, or Match suggests one for every activity that has none. See Sector matching.
Calculate
Nios calculates an activity in the background once it has a base sector, and again after you edit it. The status bar shows the progress. See Methodology.
Analyze
Find hotspots on the Nature and Climate dashboards, check the Results sheet, and export. See Measure impacts.
The side panel
Open panel in the top right of a page opens tools for that page. Activities has the Issues and Matching tabs, Organization and Impact inputs have Issues, and Impacts has Coverage and Method.
Key concepts
| Concept | What it means in Nios | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| Project | One organization's purchases for one reporting period, such as a year or a quarter. Data, settings, and results belong to a project. | Project selector, Projects |
| Activity | One good or service you bought: what it is, which supplier you bought it from, where it was produced, and how much, as spend with currency or quantity with unit. | Activities |
| Organization entity | A legal entity, site, or unit of your organization. Assign activities to entities to see impacts per entity. | Organization |
| Metric | One of the 17 environmental pressures Nios calculates for every activity, such as GHG emissions, land occupation, or water consumption. | Metrics reference |
| Base sector | The economic sector an activity belongs to, from HS/CPC product codes, GLORIA 120, or EXIOBASE 200. Nios derives the best sector for each metric from it, the metric sector, and uses that sector's default factor. | Sector matching |
| Impact input | Your own result or factor for one metric, which replaces the Nios default. Tier A is a direct result, Tier B a factor per quantity, Tier C a factor per spend. | Impact inputs |
| Pressure | A metric's midpoint result, the environmental pressure before its effect on biodiversity, such as GHG emissions in kg CO₂e, land occupation in m², or water consumption in m³ H₂Oe. | Metrics reference |
| Nature impact | Biodiversity impact in PDF·yr, the potentially disappeared fraction of species over a year. Nios derives it from pressures with LC-Impact and groups it into Ecosystem Use, Climate Change, Resource Exploitation, and Pollution. | Impacts, Nature lens |
| Climate impact | GHG emissions in t CO₂e, shown as Total emissions. | Impacts, Climate lens |
| Intensity | Impact per unit of spend in the project's base currency, for example PDF·yr/EUR. Only activities with spend count. | Impacts, Display: Intensity |
The Methodology explains each calculation step, the datasets, and the limitations.